Wheel of Fortune advice

Since I put my Wheel of Fortune appearance on YouTube, a few future contestants have asked me for advice about being on the show. As a catch-all, I'm putting some of my thoughts
here for anyone interested.

This was inspired by a recent message I received from a guy who will be taping a College Week episode next week. Here's my reply.

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First of all, congrats on beating the odds and being picked!

Heh, you know not who you ask when you pick me for Wheel advice. Before I was on, I analyzed the living daylights out of just about every aspect of the game. How much it helped, I don't know, but at least it made me feel like I was as prepared as I could be. Here are some thoughts:

In terms of flat-out puzzle solving ability, there's probably not much you can do in a week, but there are a few things worth bearing in mind that can help your chances a bit.

Part of my ridiculous pre-show overanalysis was a detailed study on letter frequencies. (I've moved a couple of times since the show, and the papers are buried somewhere unknown, so I'm doing this from memory, but it should be really close.)

In the main game, the most common consonants are T, N, R, S, and C. (L is overrated. P is extremely overrated.) My strategy was to start with those letters, and by the time I got to the end of that list, I would almost certainly have a word or two figured out, giving me more letters to call.

The most important thing is to keep your turn. If you call a wrong letter, there's a good chance that you won't get another turn at that puzzle. As such, vowels are very important. You're much less likely to call a bad vowel than a bad consonant. So my strategy was to call one consonant to get some money, then buy as many vowels as I could (order: E, A, I, O, U), or until it looked like there were probably so few vowels left that I ran a significant risk of calling a bad one. (In actuality, I never got that deep into my strategy. In rounds 1 and 4, I bought the E at my first opportunity, and both times, I figured out the puzzle from the Es, then it was all spinning to make more money.)

The goal is to keep your turn and get enough spaces filled in to figure out the puzzle, and vowels are a dirt-cheap way to do that. Vowel-buying is terribly underrated. Even if you're concerned about the cost, the next point can make vowels pay for themselves and then some....

Once you've figured out the puzzle (and it's your turn), if you don't feel you have enough money yet, do a quick inventory of what letters are left - especially what consonants there are more than one instance of. (A good time to do this is while the wheel is spinning.) And for the love of the deity of your choice, save the multiple letters for a big spin! (Or your last spin of the round.) And never waste a multiple on something that doesn't get multiplied, like gift tags, prizes, the Wild Card, or the million dollar wedge.

The orders of consonants and vowels I gave you are good defaults, if the puzzle itself doesn't give you anything to go off of. However, some categories give away letters. If you see STAR & ROLE, the word "as" is guaranteed to be in the puzzle; BOOK & AUTHOR will always contain "by". WHAT ARE YOU DOING? will usually have a word ending in "-ing". PEOPLE will usually have a word or two ending in "-s". Please take advantage of these near-gimmes.

In addition, some of the puzzles are sure to be related to the theme of the week, in your case college. This is especially true for the first toss-up and, on a week so strongly-themed that they're selecting players specifically based on it, it will probably be the case on most of the other puzzles, as well. Thinking, "This is probably, but not necessarily, about college life," may be able to help you zero in on the puzzle faster. (It helped on my first toss-up.)

Here are some of my strategies for specific game situations. Yours will probably be different, because you'll likely be starting from different premises than I was. Even so, you should definitely have a good idea in mind of what you'll do in these situations:

The Free Play wedge: This is new for this season, and you may not have heard of it yet. It replaced the free spin. To my understanding, here's how it works: if you land on it, you can call either a consonant or a vowel. Vowels are worth nothing, consonants worth $500 each. But, if you call a bad letter, you don't lose your turn; you continue as though nothing happened. If you have an idea as to what a word might be, but aren't sure, this is a great chance to call a speculative letter and possibly gain some high-quality information without risking your all-important turn.

The Wild Card: This was added after my show as well, but what I would have done is use it in the front game only if I were on the top dollar value and thought I had a good shot at hitting a letter. Otherwise, since it could be the difference between a bonus round win or loss, I would have held onto it. That said, if you're not very, very confident in your ability to get to the bonus round, I would use it on any $2500/$3500/$5000 spin, or even a $900 late in the game if it's close and there's a multiple consonant still unrevealed.

The Jackpot wedge: The only thing I might try here is calling a more speculative letter if I thought revealing it would give me a good shot at solving the puzzle right there and picking up the jackpot.

Mystery wedges: Without knowing your level of risk loving or aversion, I can't really help you here, other than to give you a good way of looking at your options. Look at where you'd be picking it up and not picking it up, and decide which looks better. For example, if you already had $2,000 in front of you in the round, landed on a mystery wedge, and uncovered two instances of a letter, your choice is what looks better: a guaranteed $4,000 in front of you, or a 50/50 shot at either $12,000 in front of you or nothing and losing your turn. The potential loss of a turn would tend to make me fairly conservative here, unless I had a big deficit to make up (or possibly a big enough lead that losing my turn wouldn't be that tragic). Your turn becomes more valuable later in the round, so I would be more likely to gamble with only a couple letters revealed (as there's a better chance of it getting back to me if I did lose my turn). I strongly recommend having some idea of what situations you'd go for it in and which you wouldn't, because that's a really big decision to make on the fly.

Million dollar wedge: If you happen to end up with this, my recommendation would be to play as conservatively as practical while still doing whatever you need to get to the bonus round. Basically, if you get the lead, nurse it and solve early.

Prize puzzle: Do not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to forget that if you solve this puzzle, you will have an additional $4500 to $9000 added to your score. If you like to travel, even better. The only reason to even think about touching the wheel after you know the puzzle is if you don't like to travel and don't place a high value on whether or not you get to the bonus round. On my show, if Renate had lost her turn, I was fully prepared to solve immediately and claim just the trip. Also, be aware that the puzzle is related to the prize, so it will almost always be something related to vacationing.

Speed-up round: If you know the puzzle, by all means look for multiple-occurrence consonants to maximize your score. If you happen to know it really early, and your score would put you just short of the win, you might want to consider not solving on that turn and hoping it gets back to you one more time. Risky, but if it's the difference between a trip to the bonus round and going straight home, it might be worth it.

Bonus round: Hopefully you get far enough that this matters. :) The letter distributions are different, as they are specifically choosing puzzles that are not given away by revealing R, S, T, L, N, and E. In my study, the most common consonants among the non-freebies were G, B, Y, F, and C, in that order. I selected F over Y because F tended to help me to solve the puzzle significantly more often than Y did (which turned out to be a really, really good thing in my case). Among the vowels, A, I, and O all ran very close in number of puzzles in which they occurred, but I found O most helpful when it did occur.

And of course, all this assumes that the puzzle itself doesn't give you any clues. If it does, alter your calls only if there's ambiguity involved. For example, if you see the word "T _ E", you can be fairly certain that there's an H there, but it's probably not worth calling, unless there's some reason to suspect that it could be "tie" or "toe".

( _ L _ _ _
T_ E
_ _ _ _ _ R

would be an unfortunate exception - hopefully, with GBFO, you could solve it from

B L _ _ _
T _ E
_ F F _ _ R)

If you're terribly afraid of that, go ahead and call the H and either the I or O. More frequently, though, you'll see a word like "_ N" or "_", which you can narrow down to "on"/"in" or "a"/"I". Definitely call one of the letters; if it's not that, you can pretty well determine that it's the other one.

Well, I hope that helped. Let me know your airdate so I can see my advice in action. And if you have any questions, well, you can obviously tell I love talking about this stuff. Good luck!